DM's Session Review

The session was rough in some ways, and resulted in two of the party members splitting off and the players making new/alternate characters. On the plus side, we had a new player join (Welcome Jack!) and a potential new player sit in to learn the game (Welcome Colin!).

Also, we worked out some kinks in terms of party chemistry, and saw some places where the rules needed tweaking.

As a result of the way it played out, extra time taken and also the game balance issues, I have decided to revoke most of the variant dice rolling rules previously mentioned on the website.

If you look now, you'll see the only variant rules are about the critical hit deck for double confirmations on critical threats, and the possibility of fumble (or critical fumbles).

We took about 3 hours in the middle of Saturday for the new character generation. My hope is that it will pay off moving forward, and that should we have character death / retirement in the future, we can have it interrupt the game less. Perhaps everyone should have one or two backup characters prepared, just in case? I'd rather not burn up valuable game time for that, since there's plenty of time to generate characters between weekends.

There was some confusion about XP awards: the 3 people who didn't make new characters got some of the XP award mentioned below during the character creation break. 2 people switched characters mid-game, so their XP awards for the session are also split between both characters. See the "NOTES" section at the bottom of this page, for details.
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It's my job to run the game and manage the players, so, I will always award myself the average of the XP the other players got for Elik. If I'm running it and managing well, everyone should do well, so I will too…

Saturday afternoon, Logan and Joe made new characters (Lilliana and Alexander, respectively) who joined the party. Ug and Derek headed back to Rudik's Pass (now as NPCs) to have their own adventure.

I gave out some XP during the character creation break, to the remaining players, based on what they'd earned thus far. The experience totals above include that XP, so please do not add it twice. Just adjust your sheet by adding what you were awarded below to what you had before the session began. Talk to me if you have any questions about this.

Also, for the people that switched characters, quest XP goes to your previous characters (since they were the ones who completed all the quests). All of the bonus XP for RP (in game and out), being on time, etc, goes to the new chars. I may not handle it this way in the future, but that's how I'm doing it for now.

Moving forward, I'm fixing the way I'm doing XP for starting new chars, so it's fair. It will be similar to the way I handle XP loss for Raise Dead. New chars will start play with XP = Party Average XP (adjusted back up for any LA buyoffs) - Last Level's XP, with a minimum ECL of 3rd. This will accurately handle when the average party level is close to leveling or just leveled up, rather than the old method of "halfway up" which was blind to that.

NOTE: This does not alter the XP given to the new characters last session. I'm tired and cranky and don't feel like dealing with it. Threz came in right after people hit 4th so 4500 is high, and Alexander and Lilliana mid-game and probably wouldn't have started as high as 4500 either, so it's better for you all this way.

For future reference, if you lose XP for things like Raise Dead, it will be your last level's worth of XP. This keeps level loss from death similarly fair.